Welcome.
I am in a similar situation - chasing merit to ease the cost of graduate education. D24 wants to be a licensed clinical counselor, which requires a doctorate. So we too are kind of chasing merit and hit Ole Miss at exactly the same level as you. But it turns out Ole Miss is not really her thing, and as of now it’s been dropped entirely from our list. We have expanded the budget for undergrad, because her current top choice has a Psy.D. program that provides support (full tuition plus reasonable living expenses) for all 4 years of the program. So we may not need as much for grad school as we feared.